Hackers turn racist in attack on hardware site

PC Chips falls victim to redneck variant of Lion worm

PC motherboard specialist PC Chips has fallen victim to defacement in an attack that shows that hackers can be unthinking racists.

The home page of the site, which runs Apache on a Red Hat Linux server, was replaced by a message from the 1i0n Crew, which contained in its headline the racist remark " Kill all the Japanese!", the defacement can be seen here.

The name of the hacking crew is associated with a Linux worm, called Lion, that attacks BIND servers and installs DDoS tools, and which poses a serious current risk to Web site administrators.

Paul Rogers, network security analyst at MIS Corporate Defence, said from the evidence on defacement archives it was likely that PC Chips, which is hosted in Hong Kong, had been hit with a variant of the Lion worm.

There is a variant of the worm that defaces Web pages, said Rogers, who added it would be "trivial" to modify and use it to create the racist message seen on PC Chips' site. ®